


Remaking

by narsus



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Incest, M/M, POV First Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-10-16
Updated: 2010-10-16
Packaged: 2017-10-12 17:42:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,169
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/127372
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/narsus/pseuds/narsus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock's reasons for doing what he does.  Sherlock's POV.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Remaking

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: Sherlock belongs to the BBC, Mark Gatiss & Steven Moffat and obviously in the genesis of it all to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

"You risk your life to prove you're clever."

John is, in his own way, immeasurably wrong. Needing to prove cleverness would require a lack of belief in and an aspiration to it in the first place. That's hardly an issue. I am not clever, not smart, not even a genius. Other people are just so utterly stupid, dull, lifeless. Only Mycroft is really smart when I think about, which is, quite frankly speaking, far too often. My brother is a genius. The only genius of his generation, and mine. I am only perceptive: Mycroft is... I only read what is written on the faces and clothes and hands of regular mortal beings. Mycroft can predict what will occur even before it occurs and leaves its inevitable traces. In another lifetime they would have burned him at the stake.

I am not a clever man but I am a perceptive one. I notice the minutiae that pass most others by; I can theorise without human emotions getting in the way. When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. I can eliminate the impossible with ruthless efficiency. Perhaps the same sort of efficiency that Mycroft displays when he positions his human pawns for yet another triumphant strike. He is utterly inhuman, in his actions, in his words, in that horrid, breathtakingly, chillingly mechanical smile. Sometimes I wonder if I really ought to analyse it, what it is that makes me want to provoke him to smile at me like that. He never looks human when he does it and I imagine that if I could push him just that little bit too far then his hands wouldn't feel human either. I'd never be able to escape if I did. I'd drown in those unfeeling eyes and when whatever was left of me re-emerged, I'm not sure that it would be human either.

People are inexcusably thick. It isn't that they fail to see, only that they refuse to. Except John. John is people and he's not particularly stupid. Lestrade is too, people and not particularly stupid either. So, if he stopped trying to bark at anything that came near his territory, would Anderson be too. Donovan also, granted, because under that childish name calling is a brain that functions well enough. Even... a hundred and one other human beings, people. Not quite stupid, not quite consistent but always unbearably dull. Deliberately so. As if they actively cultivate it. Which they probably do. It wouldn't even take a sociopath to make that judgement, though a psychopath might come to it with some difficulty. Mycroft's conclusion would be a matter of efficiency and might well be formulated in a string of ones and zeros.

I have days when I wonder if the descriptor of highly functioning sociopath is accurate, because at times I'm not socially functional at all. I do have rather standard morals at least: it's just that I can turn them off. Like the flick of a switch I can turn my emotions off as necessary, usually. I can't quite manage it with John but that's because he likes to be difficult. Lestrade does too. I might not walk through fire to save either of them but I'd be sure to call the appropriate emergency services. Or better still, have Mycroft do it. Aside from those anomalies I do have a crude sort of control over my emotions: on or off, that's all there is. I don't have the sort of extra features that Mycroft deploys with cruel efficiency. I can't submerge all feeling in thermal coolant but still pretend that all those emotions are so very, very real. I can fake things if necessary but never with the same sort of precision he employs.

Some days I want to rap my knuckles against Mycroft's forehead just to see if he clangs. I think he might, beneath that careful veneer of soft human tissue. I like to think that if I could push him far enough, when his fingers close over my skin punishingly, I'll be able to see the glint of metal beneath. When the back of his hand strikes my face, I think he'll leave cuts from the mechanical underlay, when his hands close around my wrists, I'll feel the sickening sensation of their being crushed, when his face is so close to mine that I can see behind the false layer of human cornea, I'll see the cable that curls in on itself behind. And when that day comes, when I lie broken at his feet, I like to think that for the first time I'll actually do something unpredictable to him. I won't scream or cry or accuse like a regular human ought to. Instead I'll beg him to remake me, to change me into something that can be of use to him, to repurpose human flesh and bone for his purpose.

One of these days I'll force his hand and everything will change. I will change, into something better, more useful. Something that he will call beautiful and efficient. I will become something that is no longer simply tolerated but desired. And I will stop being human at all. The biological failure of flesh and bone will remain, but underneath, everything that could ever have been called human will have withered and died. I will be perfect such as he will define it. And perhaps then, finally, I will kiss mere mortals goodbye. John and Lestrade both. Perhaps I will press my cold lips to theirs in a last farewell and they will know that I have been irrevocably changed.

In the meantime I wait. I expend my energies in the pursuit of the next puzzle with which to exercise my mind. I must remain in constant motion else that accident of birth, honed by logic and reason, will begin to decay. I will begin to wither in his sight and if that decay goes unchecked, that rot allowed to run rampant, then one day I will stop being worthy of his attention and will instead become fallibly mortal. Just like all the rest. It is a fate that I despise. I will not sink in his estimation, I will not fail. I will prove myself, continuously, as he demands, until at last I am worthy and under that synthetic gaze I am transformed.

I do not risk myself to prove any mortal measure of cleverness but to push myself beyond all human norms. I do it to prove my efficiency, my detachment, my inherent distaste of this mortal condition. I haven't yet proven myself enough but eventually I will, eventually I will become more than myself. Not in measures of more or less but distinct difference from that which is human. Then I will understand his cold dispassion completely. I will have purged myself of all my fragility and will no longer crave... I will understand at last and be content in my sterile, static, place at his side.

**Author's Note:**

> Of course no witches were ever burned at the stake in England and the punishment was for heresy rather than directly for witchcraft.


End file.
